Anthony Basile

Fall means many things – Halloween decorations all over town, scarves and flannel coming back into fashion, pumpkin spice everything – but the season is especially important to baseball fans. The Major League postseason has arrived once again, bringing a grueling gauntlet of win-or-go-home series. The theme of the season is elimination. One day, you’re riding high…

The next, your favorite team is history for another year.

In the high-stakes spirit of the playoffs, this week’s content marketing tips and spotlight articles are all about the concept of addition through subtraction. Just as a narrowing field of playoff contenders lets the league’s best test their mettle against the very best, a spirit of curation and editing in your content marketing efforts can deliver top-quality results.

So grab your batting gloves and step up to the plate, using these three articles as inspiration for your next few months of content marketing – they’ll help you put some numbers on the scoreboard.

Thin Content: Why You Should Fix or Remove Low-Quality Web Pages

The concept behind this Content Marketing Institute article by Jonas Sickler is as simple as it gets – rather than simply letting your weakest-performing webpages sit around, you should make an effort to prune them, leaving only pages that provide positive value. In practice, this is very much like ending the regular season and letting the 2019 Detroit Tigers – with their .292 winning percentage – take a few months off to recuperate.

It’s tempting to treat older content, pages that don’t count for anything in Google’s all-important algorithm, as things to be ignored and forgotten. Sickler argues that rather than forgetting all about these pieces of “thin content,” savvy marketers will be proactive about taking them down. Because Google’s algorithm splits its crawl bandwidth and link equity across every page on a company’s website, useless content pages lower the site’s average authority and its organic search ranking.

Sickler suggests that companies review their content and take away pages that target irrelevant topics, are out of date, short, redundant or come from little-used categories. A single large and authoritative content piece on a topic beats a large amount of small, irrelevant pages when it comes to SEO value.

Content Marketing Best Practices + Examples From Top Brands

This rundown of content creation best practices from social media firm LYFE Marketing is full of useful ideas in general, but it’s the last section, where the post focuses on how NOT to handle content marketing, that the idea of elimination comes into play.

First of all, corporate social media users shouldn’t just put random posts up on their accounts and consider that content marketing. LYFE requests “carefully curated content that resonates with your audience,” and that kind of production would be diluted by the presence of too many irrelevant photos or other updates. It would be like narrowing the field to the elite playoff teams, then tossing games on the schedule against any old squad that shows up to the stadium – it undercuts the seriousness of the endeavor.

LYFE also noted that content creators should balance consistent posting schedules with quality. Everything that goes on a blog or social account should be vetted to make sure it’s up to standards – if not, it should get an extra coat of polish.

Four Best Practices For A Killer B2B Content Marketing Strategy

This Forbes Agency Council post by Sway Group founder and CEO Danielle Wiley reveals a central truth of B2B content marketing, one that all creatives targeting other businesses should take to heart: Curation in the B2B world isn’t just about cutting your postings and assets down and focusing on quality over quantity. Companies should also be cutting down their AUDIENCES, pushing their materials directly to the small, relevant slice of the potential audience that represents prime buyers.

When selling B2B products and services, just about everything is niche on a level that would be considered extreme in B2C sales. This means reaching the right people with the right message, potentially using paid boosts on ostensibly free platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to make sure top potential customers – playoff teams of B2B marketing – see the content.

Now, after perusing these tips and thinking about how they apply to content marketing, it’s time to log off and get back to watching the playoffs. No matter who takes home the World Series title this year, our hats are off to them and we salute them for a great season. Unless it’s the Yankees. Apologies to New York fans, but Brafton is based in the heart of Boston. These are the rules.